Wait what? I thought World of Warcraft was always being updated and patched?

True, but we at mangos-zero believe it is simply awesome to have the original
game preserved as it was. If you are big on nostalgia or just missed out on the
early days of World of Warcraft, stay with us as vanilla WoW is right here.

The chapters in this documentation will teach you all there is to know about
running your own vanilla WoW server, even describing how you can build upon
it and develop your own customizations.

Ever since 2005 you have the option to play old game
content from the World of Warcraft because the MaNGOS project (and others)
have released their server as Open Source to the public.

As of now, the MaNGOS project has been split up. If you look for other
expansions such as The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King, you
should pay a visit to the CMaNGOS project which provides maintained
server projects for both World of Warcraft expansions.

As of December 2013 this project has been my personal - as in me, Daniel S.
Reichenbach - pet project. I created forks of the MaNGOS and ScriptDev2
repositories and published my bitbucket project where you can grab all
code, and - of course - this documentation, too.

Currently (July 2014) there is no real team behind this project, it is just
me. Of course, I do accept contributions in the form of pull requests or
issue reports but I am not actively seeking developers.

I have had my fair share of trouble with MaNGOS and the numerous forks,
due to most of them focussing on short term results instead of working on
things that will result in long term benefits for users and developers.

Coming from a professional development background, I intend to turn mangos-zero
and thus what is left of vanilla WoW into a project of which I can be
proud of and which you - the user - can fully enjoy.

My guiding principles are:

make it easy to use. Getting the software, building and installing,
and using it should be easy as having a piece of cake.

have awesome documentation and preserve knowledge. The WoW emulation scene
often tends to keep secrets and avoids documentation. This results in
forums seeing the same questions over and over ever since 2005. Here
you will not see this. If a question is asked, it will be solved and
documented for all users.

Also I intend to publish every background information I have. This includes
things such as protocol information for client / server communication,
a full run-down on database structures and usage, or even practical
guides on how to use scripting in mangos-zero.

produce good code and stick with it. Good code does follow best
practices, is readable, documented and thus easy to use for the new
developer in town. I do not want to see you looking at the code and
having to ask 20 questions, one should be sufficient to let you use
and benefit from the projects’ code.

If all this is still not enough, I recommend taking a look at the
minifesto which I intend to follow with every change and update I
make for this project.